Why on Earth Is Trump Making Infomercials From the Rose Garden?

You may be wondering why, throughout the second half of August, the president of the United States has been standing in the Rose Garden and yelling.

On August 17, he yelled about manufacturing. On August 18, he yelled about trade and, later that day, he yelled about meeting with foreign leaders. On August 22, he yelled about the stock market. And on August 24, he yelled about the economy. The resulting video clips, which range from 23 to 60 seconds in length, are like stream-of-consciousness infomercials for the flimsy concept of #AIGGADW (America Is Getting Great Again, Don’t Worry). With his hands conducting dramatically at his sides, he began the first episode like this: “Made in America is back! Now, some people would say ‘Made in the USA’ — I personally don’t care. The fact is, we’re back.”

According to — I swear to God — five current and former officials from both Donald Trump’s White House and campaign as well as one former official from the Trump Organization, the purpose of this on-camera exercise is simple: It makes him feel (and, he believes, look) good. It’s also a reminder of a freer time in his life, on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, when he first perfected the cockeyed art of digital media virality with an off-the-cuff series of videos called From the Desk of Donald J. Trump and Ask the Donald.

“The president didn’t like the sitting down, read prompter, lights-inside-a-room at the White House. So, he told the digital guys at the communications shop to come up with a couple of new ideas, and this was one of them. The president liked it, and we’re trying it out,” one senior White House official told me.

“He is the most TV-savvy president in history. Somebody said to me today, ‘Reagan was, too!’ Well, Reagan was a little bit more movies,” the senior official said. “Because of The Apprentice and everything else this gentleman has done in his life, he understands all of this — he understands lighting and, to some degrees, in some rooms of the White House, he’s not a big fan of it. So, we’re just trying to help him.”

The lighting is key. In fact, it’s the first thing you notice, in the half-a-second before the yelling starts. Soft and flattering, it creates a sort of airbrushed effect when judged against his weekly addresses, which may explain why the White House hasn’t released a weekly address since August 3, just before the introduction of the Rose Garden videos. (Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not respond when asked why the addresses had stopped and if these Rose Garden videos will be replacing them.)

“Outside has the best lighting. If you look at most of the things we’ve done that look really good, it’s been outside,” the senior White House official said.

Before the era of Bill Shine, the former Fox News president who joined the White House staff in July, the video content produced by the communications department was mostly limited to footage from official events and those boring, scripted addresses, closely cropped around his face, with a flag and blah wood paneling from one room or the other as backdrop. One attempt to liven things up, in which Trump and his staffers were asked to weigh in on the great philosophical debate of 15 weeks ago, Yanny or Laurel, was a critical flop.

As during the Obama administration, the lighting, teleprompter, and camera were provided by the White House Communications Agency, which may not meet the standard NBC set for the president during his time as the network’s premiere reality star. Justin McConney, the director of new media at the Trump Organization from 2011 to 2017, remembers the simple directions the future president had for professionals who filmed him: “He liked the way he looked on The Apprentice,” McConney told me. “That’s always the way he’d come back to, ‘Shoot me like I’m shot on The Apprentice.’” Several hundred miles south of his old life, Trump has been known to complain about everything, including Air Force One, where he dislikes being filmed because he says the lighting is unflattering.

McConney said when he got to the Trump Organization, Trump was so unfamiliar with the internet that he’d have McConney come into his office to read him his Twitter mentions out loud. Trump loved them. “He would say, ‘I wanna see more of these! Get me more, get me more!’” So McConney would print them out and bring them to his boss, who would take out his famous black Sharpie marker. “He’d circle ones he wanted to reply to, and I’d go back and do the replies.” This was back when Trump had a flip phone. (In 2012, when he got an Android, he began tweeting himself.)

McConney also taught Trump that the internet, beyond an ego boost, could have real value if you knew how to use it. “To him, unless it’s on TV or in the newspaper, because he’s old school, it’s not going to mean anything. So the first thing I thought of, What if I did these low-budget video blogs?” McConney said he would walk into his office with a small camera, ask him to respond to the news, and then post the video with the hopes that it would be aired on TV. The result was From the Desk of Donald J. Trump.

“The first one that was really a hit was, I don’t know if you remember this, but him and Sarah Palin went out to eat pizza, remember? And he used a fork and knife to eat pizza.” McConney walked up to Trump at his desk. “I said ‘Mr. Trump, can we do a video asking why you eat pizza with a fork and knife?’” After the video was posted, “every TV show’s playing it, every comedy show.” Trump called McConney back into his office the next morning. “He goes, ‘That was fantastic, I just had to shoot this little thing on this little camera, and it’s on every single TV station. It’s great,’” McConney said, doing a (pretty good) Trump impersonation.

“From that point on, he really saw the potential with social media … with free, earned media.” McConney began walking around with a camera in his pocket so he could leap into action whenever Trump decided he had something to say worth sharing with the world.

How the product looked was not of particular importance to Trump then, at least not compared to how well the product was doing by the numbers. McConney said there was a sort of mental barrier, where Trump didn’t consider images produced by an iPhone or existing only on the internet to be legitimate. “If it was shot on an iPhone, he didn’t seem to care. But if it involved professional equipment, he wanted to review them.” A second video series McConney premiered in 2013, Ask the Donald, was, unlike From the Desk of Donald J. Trump, produced with professional equipment, in a conference room on the 25th floor of Trump Tower. For the first one, the question Trump answered was: When are you going to run for president? “That was, by far, the most popular question,” McConney said.

In the White House, things have been less freewheeling. But McConney said he was happy to see the nod to Trump’s past in the Rose Garden videos. “I started seeing those pop up last week, and I’m like, You know, outside the messy desk, if you change the background, these are a lot like what we used to do between 2011 and 2015. I don’t know what made him go back to doing those, but I think it’s good. I think they’re funny and they make him more relatable.”

The senior White House official told me that the similarities between the Rose Garden videos and From the Desk of Donald J. Trump was “maybe not a coincidence.”

According to those who worked with him in the White House during the first year of his administration, it’s easy to see why this experiment may have looked like a good idea. “He frequently would comment on the lighting, in particular. He would make suggestions about what lights to turn up and turn down, et cetera, and he was just concerned about the overall quality of the product,” a former White House official who was a part of the video production team told me. “He’s keyed into two things: one, how the shot looks and how he looks, and the second is the metrics. He wants to know how many people have watched the last video we did.”

A second former White House official said that Trump’s negative reviews of lighting or other matters of staging were proxy complaints for deeper frustrations about how he looked to the public. “He was always upset about everything from a communications perspective. I think a lot of it was he was transposing his anger with the way the media was portraying what he was doing against lighting and everything like that. He wouldn’t be able to sit there and be like, ‘The media is pissed off at me because I’ve been doing a bunch of crazy shit that falls way outside the norms of political discourse and political behavior in this country.’ He can’t really say that. That requires the ability to have some self reflection. So instead he blames things like the lighting, or the team, or stuff like that.”

Whether or not there was actually an aesthetics problem, Trump’s new communications director Bill Shine saw a solution in the grounds of the White House. For the majority of his 35 years in television, he’d worked alongside Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, once a media consultant for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, creating the flashy cable programs that would eventually help create Trump. “I definitely think having Bill Shine there now is really good for video production stuff, because that’s what he did — he produced all these TV shows, a lot of shows Trump likes and watches on a daily basis,” the second former White House official told me.

To a TV producer, a place like the Rose Garden — a lush patch of greenery that, lit by the sun, looks like something out of a Thomas Kinkade painting — was an underutilized set. Upon joining the administration, he made it a point to tell associates inside and outside the government that he would be making changes to improve the production value of official President Donald J. Trump content, and, according to the senior White House official, he has helped with the “choreography” of the Rose Garden videos. The official added that there are plans to increase the output of such content in the coming weeks, as Trump embarks on a 40-stop tour ahead of the midterm elections: “You’re gonna hear and see a lot more of this president.” If things continue going to shit with Shine around, at least Trump will be well-lit.

The Pentagon is set to begin a drawdown of its 5,800 troops from the Southwest border as early as this week, the Army commander overseeing the mission told POLITICO today — even as the approaching caravan of refugees prompted U.S. customs officers to close a port of entry near Tijuana, Mexico.

All the active-duty troops that President Donald Trump ordered sent to the border before the midterm elections should be home by Christmas, said Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, who is running the mission from San Antonio, Texas.

A shooting at a Chicago hospital has wounded multiple people, including a suspect and a police officer, authorities said.

Shots were fired Monday afternoon at Mercy Hospital on the city’s South Side, and officers were searching the facility. Police issued a statement on Twitter saying there were “reports of multiple victims.”

A witness named James Gray told Chicago television station ABC 7 that he saw multiple people shot: “It looked like he was turning and shooting people at random.”

From @presssec: new rules for reporters at WH press conferences.- one question per reporter, then yield floor and microphone.- followup question “may be permitted.” Then yield floor and microphone.- “failure to abide” may result in suspension/revocation” of WH press pass.

so, the conventional wisdom on election night was that democrats had not achieved the resounding repudiation of president trump they were looking for. yes, they’d won the house, but not overwhelmingly. and progressive favorites stacey abrams, andrew gillum, and beto o’rourke had gone down to defeat. meanwhile, republicans had made slight gains in the senate. a few days later, the thinking shifted in Democrats’ favor, as more late-breaking results came in from various states, especially california, which is notoriously slow at counting ballots, and where the party did extremely well. we’re not almost two weeks out from the election, enough time to look at things more dispassionately. how do you rate the performance now?

Trying to get away from the endless and interminable and redundant arguments over how to define a “wave.”

Benjamin Hart3:10 PM

yes, I agree, there is little more tedious than parsing what defines a wave

Ed Kilgore3:11 PM

Democrats won the House popular vote and picked up 37 or 38 seats. Dems won 22 of 34 Senate races (with one in Mississippi still to go), and by just about any measure, more Senate votes. And they picked up seven net governorship and seven state legislative chambers.

Part of the problem is that an insanely pro-GOP Senate landscape made a good Democratic performance look bad.

And the other problem was sky-high Democratic expectations, plus the overwhelming attention given to close races in Florida, Georgia and Texas.

Which all went Republican.

Benjamin Hart3:13 PM

yes, and the pressure to prematurely label the evening one way or another, which is endemic to election coverage (and which I don’t see going away any time soon)

the other thing, I think, is that trump is such an outlier of a person and president that some people view anything less than a sweeping rejection the likes of which we’ve never seen before as a bit of a letdown

Ed Kilgore3:14 PM

Yeah, the commentariat has not adjusted well to the slow counts that ever-increasing voting-by-mail plus provisional ballots have introduced.

As for Trump, I guess part of the polarization over him is that it’s hard for partisans to interpret anything that happens as anything other than total victory or defeat for MAGA. And the MSM tends to respond with quick judgments of a “split decision,” which is very misleading.

Benjamin Hart3:20 PM

yep. haven’t seen TOO much of that since the election, to be fair. but back to the actual gains made by dems, which it’s easy to lose track of amid the hundreds of results. what do you think was their most important victory other than winning the House? for me, it might have been knocking off scott walker in wisconsin.

Ed Kilgore3:23 PM

Guess it depends on your interpretation of “important.” If you mean “soul-satisfying for progressives,” then yeah, finally taking down the guy who had most consistently applied the worst kind of conservative policies to a previously progressive state was a very big deal.

Sweeping Orange County, California’s congressional seats was another big deal emotionally, particularly for those of us old enough to remember O.C. as a John Birch Society hotbed.

From a more practical point of view, all those congressional wins mattered–first, as part of a House takeover, and second, as a foundation for (maybe) a Dem reconquest of the Senate in 2020.

And the gubernatorial and state legislative gains will help with the next round of redistricting, though there’s some unfinished business on that front in 2020.

As I’ve argued at some length, even some losses were important for Dems–particularly the Florida and Georgia gubernatorial elections and the Texas Senate race. They showed that finally “national Democrats” (including African-Americans) can do better in the former Confederacy than Blue Dogs–at least in states with the requisite combination of a large minority vote and some upscale suburbs.

Benjamin Hart3:29 PM

yes, and that may also have big repercussion in terms of what kind of candidate democrats want to nominate in 2020

Ed Kilgore3:30 PM

Well, it certainly reinforces the idea that there’s a “sunbelt strategy” for 2020 that could work as an alternative to Democrats obsessing about the Rust Belt states Trump carried.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right – arizona and georgia really could be in play

and, of course, florida

Ed Kilgore3:31 PM

And North Carolina.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right.

so, all in all, a democratic party that is somewhat addicted to being traumatized should be feeling pretty good

Ed Kilgore3:35 PM

Yeah. There were some painful near-misses, but not really much grounds for a struggle-for-the-soul-of-the-party thing. That’s good, since Democrats will need all their energy to winnow their 40-candidate presidential field.

A Florida elections expert digs into what went wrong for Democrats on Tuesday

This election was the third consecutive Governor’s race decided by a point or less, bracketing two consecutive Presidential elections decided by a point. This drives homes two points: One, Florida, for all its dynamic growth and demographic changes, is very stable; and Two, when organizations like Quinnipiac try to peddle off polls showing candidates in Florida with 6-point leads, or 9-point leads, you now know what to do with that information (a post/rant on public polling is coming soon).

There are a lot of reasons why Florida is very competitive…but it is what it is. Big chunks of Florida cancel each other out, and both parties have large, and quite dug-in bases – and neither have a base that alone gets them to 50% + 1. Winning Florida (or losing it) is about managing the margins throughout Florida.

16 Democratic representatives signed a letter opposing Nancy Pelosi for House speaker … but she still has no announced challenger

… Pelosi could lose as many as 15 Democratic votes when she stands for election as speaker on Jan. 3. One of the 16 signers, Ben McAdams (Utah), is now trailing Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah) and might never cast a speaker vote.

Not signing the letter is Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio), who has publicly opposed Pelosi and is now mulling a run against her. Fudge said Friday she would not make a final decision on whether to run until next week at the earliest.

Another five Democrats — Rep. Conor Lamb (Pa.) and Reps.-elect Jason Crow (Colo.), Jared Golden (Maine), Mikie Sherrill (N.J.) and Abigail Spanberger (Va.) — have made firm statements saying they would not vote for Pelosi but did not sign the letter.

stacey abrams and andrew gillum both conceded their elections this weekend to their republican opponents after protracted post-election battle. realistically, did either of them have any other option but to call it quits?

Zak Cheney-Rice11:47 AM

I think with Gillum the outcome was more or less decided on election night. His race was always more of a long shot than Bill Nelson’s reelection bid — the other high-profile Florida contest that dragged on into last week — and was never as close as that one. But I think it’s important to note that Abrams was pretty intentional about not conceding, in the traditional sense. She basically said, in so many words, that Kemp’s victory would have to stand because she saw no other available legal recourse available. I think she knew her options included dragging this out longer, but also knew that, legally, there wasn’t much she could do to alter the outcome.

But she has said she will continue to pursue issues around election integrity in Georgia, and I think that will include several (more) legal challenges to Kemp’s win, or at least to the mechanisms that facilitated it

Benjamin Hart11:48 AM

yes, she did not praise kemp, and called his win “legal” but refused to say that he was “legitimate” when asked by jake tapper

Zak Cheney-Rice11:52 AM

Yeah the question of legitimacy seems to be a sticking point for a lot of folks. There’s a Slate piece (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/georgia-stacey-abrams-brian-kemp-election-not-stolen.html) circulating today arguing that we shouldn’t describe the Georgia election as “stolen,” and the first reason listed is because it could lead more and more people to see American elections as illegitimate. But I think the cat is pretty far out the bag on that one. He’s out and running down the street. I live in Atlanta and there are piles of little cards littering the streets around Piedmont Park (the city’s Central Park equivalent) that read, “Stolen Votes.” There are many, many people who believe this election was ill-gotten. So yeah, I think it is fair to say this wasn’t a legitimate win by plenty of metrics.

I’m not sure what group — activist, political, or otherwise — created the cards, to be clear. But it expresses a widely held sentiment.

Benjamin Hart11:57 AM

yeah, I have to say I’ve been on the other side on that debate – while I think kemp is a dirty character and absolutely employed the underhanded tactics we’ve all heard about, “stolen” struck me as a rhetorical bridge too far, for the reasons that a) it’s an escalation that I’m not sure is useful in the wider context of institutional delegitimization that republicans are pushing and b) we don’t actually KNOW if kemp’s actions swung the election, though we can suspect they did. I’m interested to hear you say otherwise, though.

Zak Cheney-Rice12:07 PM

I think it’s a useful and accurate frame, but it definitely has a veneer of plausible deniability because so much of what goes into “stealing” these elections takes place long before election day. Brian Kemp can always point to the fact that he’s acting well within the law, but it’s important to note these are laws he and/or his party created, likely for this very purpose. If you disenfranchise more than a million people — often for quibbling bureaucratic irregularities — and do so in a way that pretty transparently targets those whose lives are already beset by instability and unpredictability around housing, transportation, and employment, you are essentially creating the electorate you want. In Republicans’ case, that electorate is one skewed toward maintaining white, and conservative, power, at the expense of black voters, young voters, and poor voters (all of which often overlap). So the question of “theft,” it seems to me, is purely rhetorical. In our technical, traditional understanding of elections, we would not necessarily describe elections that took place in the Jim Crow South as “stolen.” But if roughly half of the Jim Crow South’s electorate is either barred from voting outright or forced to navigate an insane labyrinth of inconveniences, barriers, and sometimes outright violence to cast their ballots, it’s a stretch to describe that as legitimate, either.

That is, of course, a matter of differing scale. But it doesn’t take much to tip an election like Kemp-Abrams.

Also, it’s not our job as voters to keep falsely believing our elections are “legitimate” when clearly, in several key ways, the evidence suggests otherwise.

That distinction is earned.

Benjamin Hart12:12 PM

all good and useful points. but I do think the phraseology matters. would you say that the florida election was stolen because of the state’s disenfranchisement of felons?

Zak Cheney-Rice12:24 PM

It does matter, I think, but I haven’t found any of the arguments that dismiss such phrasing as extreme, or bemoan how it sows mistrust in our systems, to be especially convincing. I do believe that locking up black people at disproportionate rates, then ensuring they cannot vote even after they’ve done time, is doing the same work that racist voter suppression does by all the means listed above. It is stealing their right to vote, plain and simple. I think we can have a nuanced discussion about whether that means elections are being “stolen” outright or not (I tend to lean toward yes) but at the end of the day I think the more pressing issue is that we are building our democracy by ensuring people who should be able to vote cannot, and that we perhaps need more urgent language to describe the actual stakes there.

The California union that provided major funding for successful ballot campaigns to expand Medicaid in three red states this year is already looking for where to strike next to expand Obamacare coverage in the Donald Trump era.

Leaders of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West declined to identify which states they might target in 2020. But the six remaining states where Medicaid could be expanded through the ballot are on the group’s radar: Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming.

NEW: CNN asks court for an emergency hearing Monday afternoon, as the White House still plans to boot CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, despite court order that reinstated the journalist. https://t.co/vrmtazbgcI